Q&A: WatchGuard's New Sales VP Looks To Boost Sales, Lead Gen

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WatchGuard Technologies executives are looking to find ways to help channel providers move upstream to larger businesses, according to the firm's new channel chief.

Larger businesses with distributed office locations may be well suited for unified threat management appliances that are easy to deploy and maintain, said Alex Thurber, who was named this week as WatchGuard's vice president of sales for the Americas and EMEA regions. Thurber, a security industry veteran, spent a year establishing global partnerships for Tripwire, a compliance vendor with a direct sales model in the U.S. His roots are in the channel, having built his own company before spending several years at McAfee and nearly a decade at Cisco Systems.

Seattle-based WatchGuard recently introduced an appliance for larger businesses. It competes with Barracuda Networks, Sophos and Dell SonicWall. The company will look to make gains against larger competitors by innovating on its technology, Thurber said. A recent market analysis conducted by Frost and Sullivan found that Fortinet, Check Point and Dell SonicWall hold nearly 49-percent market share.

In an interview with CRN, Thurber said he would conduct a thorough assessment of the company's territories to find regions where the company needs to attract more partners. WatchGuard will also focus on improving lead generation and support for current providers, he said. Here are excerpts from the interview.

Why did you move from Tripwire to WatchGuard

I've always been interested in WatchGuard certainly as a company with rich history when it comes to security. If you look at my overall career, it's had three major themes. It's been focused on security, on global or international business and on the channel. The opportunity to work with WatchGuard that is so focused on the channel really is one that I couldn't turn down.

WatchGuard is aimed at small and midsize enterprises. Where do you see opportunity for growth

Our target market is that SME [small and medium enterprises] piece. We are well known for selling into the large-small business so to speak. One of the great opportunities here, as the company has been investing in the technology, is to work with larger midsize enterprises. I bring that knowledge of that midsize channel to work with that partner who wants to help sell up. That really was a perfect synergy.

Is there anything you will immediately do at WatchGuard, from lead generation to addressing support issues?

I had my first seven-hour meeting yesterday, and it was all around lead processing and lead generation. It was all focused around how we can use our inside sales resources and our telemarketing resources to get leads to the partners as quickly as possible and to get leads to those focused partners that want to work with us and drive that business together. We are a channel-focused company, and we will grow by working with the channel. That is DNA within this company, and it is really exciting to be able to focus on that. In July, we'll have quarterly business reviews with all the various teams and that will give me a great insight into what's working and where there are some areas we can improve on.

XChange Solution Provider 2015 is finally upon us and the timing couldn't be better. The premier channel event is happening March 1-3 in Dallas, bringing together 225 solution provider decision makers from across North America. CRN is at the event to provide news, analysis and a firsthand take from partners.